Google’s Real-Time Voice Translator



Google engineers are working on a translator for Google Android smartphones to convert one language into another quickly enough to allow speakers without a common language to communicate with one another in near real time.

…which is why, to date, the translators we’ve seen are basically elaborate gimmicks, limited by the size of their dictionaries and inability to parse phrases.
As usual, Google’s goal is loftier: to enable real-time translation of spoken meaning, rather than just words. To do this, the company is cobbling together its voice recognition, 52-language text translation, and text-to-speech technologies into a unified voice-to-voice translator. (Actually, the full path would be voice-to-text-to-translation-to-voice. )
We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time, Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, told Times Online. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.
Google has at least two tricks up its sleeve for improving the accuracy of its translation system: crawling web pages and documents in various languages to improve its…

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Google’s Real-Time Voice Translator

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  4. Google is Working on Speech-to-Speech Translation
  5. Android Language Translator Apps |

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 11:19 am and is filed under News. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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